AML 6017

The Early US Novel

This course has three main points of interest: the development of the US novel from the 1780s to 1820; the development of criticism of the early US novel over the past thirty years; and the consideration of early US conservatism as a new and influential political formation. For the past thirty years, scholarship on the novel has been profoundly shaped by Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word (1986, expanded ed. 2004). Davidson foregrounded the then-pressing question of canonicty, and almost singly recuperated Susanna Rowson’s best-selling novel Charlotte Temple. At the same time, she emphasized the radical qualities of early fiction, even comparing elite reactions to the novel to their fears of Shays’s Rebellion. Subsequent criticism has been a mixed bag. Much has stressed the novel’s literary radicalism, the dynamics of sentimentality, and transatlantic systems, though serious challenges to the novel canon did not really materialize: twenty-five years after Davidson, early America’s most prolific novelist enjoys dozens of different editions of Charlotte Temple, with only two other novels and a play in print. Meanwhile, consideration of the early novel’s remarkable parochialism, frequent anti-sentimentalism, and deep conservatism is relatively minimal.

So while this course will ask you to read widely across early US fiction (and related poetry, theater, and essays), our focus will be on the dynamics, insights, and limitations of literary history from the 1980s on. Specifically we’ll talk about the challenges of political characterizations of fiction, the problem of conservatism (a term that only appears after this period), the challenges of canon-busting and transformation, and the more general unfolding of critical movements.

CRW
6130

Graduate Fiction Workshop

Your job is to write with force and surprise and to tender your efforts regularly and cleanly. My job is to induce criticism which will cure whatever ills are at hand without making the writer ill.

It is difficult to say what is wrong with a piece of fiction in a way that will be at once corrective and palatable to its author. A good professional editor may manage it with a piece not much flawed. I fear, after nearly twenty years trying, that it is rarely possible to do this in a direct way to a more troubled piece of writing for the forming writer then and there. I believe, though, that it is possible, in speaking ostensibly about this or that piece of writing by this or that writer, to speak prescriptively and salubriously toward the bettering of later writing, both that done by an author and by witnesses to his or her ordeal. A general sense of what constitutes good writing is supposed to obtain in the course of our piecemeal daily assaults upon the specific faults and merits of a particular piece of writing.

Objective of course clearly stated at outset: that you leave it writing better than when you entered it. That you put to paper things not said before that surprise us.

CRW
6166

Research and Imaginative Writing

This course will examine the methods that imaginative writers employ when conducting research for stories, novels, and poems. Topics to be covered include:

Use of Archives and Databases

Primary and Secondary Sources

Works of Imaginative Writing as Sources for Works of Imaginative Writing

The Internet and its Perils

Interviews and Testimony

Focused and Unfocused Research

Reading will consist of novels, among them Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring, Joanna Scott’s Arrogance, Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It, David Lodge’s Author! Author!, Colm Toibin’s The Master, and Mary Robison’s 1 DOA, 1 On the Way. We will also read essays by writers about the research process, such as David Lodge’s “The Year of Henry James” and Bruce Duffy’s essay on the writing of The World As I Found It.

Students will be asked to undertake research projects of their own and to report on their progress as the semester goes along. Your final project will be a proposal for a work of research-driven fiction or poetry accompanied by a precis of the research that will drive it. Although you will not be required to bring in any actual stories, novel excerpts, or poems, opportunities will be provided for those who wish to do so.

I am hoping to invite visitors to the class, among them UF English librarian John Van Hook and Mary Robison.

CRW
6331

Graduate Poetry Workshop

Not – contrary to rumour – the monumental and indestructible Ted Hughes again, but a mixed menu of petits-four and amuse-bouches, permed from the following suspects (or others not yet hauled in for questioning, or over the coals), including, but not limited to: Ian Hamilton, Jo Shapcott, Frederick Seidel, James Schuyler, and Charles Simic. Perhaps just the s’s.

ENG
6075

The University & Queer Indigestion

A series of seemingly unrelated texts and notions take up possible situations hedging the new university, hedging what impels us to and resists that site. The readings will put into play certain asymmetrical forces that may prove useful for understanding possible futures of the university as each of them opens a resistive site for any particular future. For our purposes we can designate these forces to be explored in our readings as the drive to experiment; queer indigestion’s disruption of the line separating human and animal; and the commons to result from the spaces and spacing of junk, technology, and education.

Course Requirements:

A fifteen-page paper (4500 words) (75%)

Seminar presentation (15%)

Seminar participation (which includes being responsible for class discussion in general and for a particular hour of the seminar’s discussion) (10%)

ENG
6075

Writing to Death: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida

In this seminar, we will theorize the practice of writing to “Death” in relation to autobiography, literature, and philosophy in works of Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. We examine writing as a “teleo-graphic,” even spectral medium, reading “everything” in the texts we will discuss, including typography (spacing breaks, font, periods, page layout design, quotation marks, “invisible” quotation marks, emphases), the paratext (the title, preface, and even the date on the copyright page of a book), and facsimiles (of an author’s manuscript, note cards, water color illustrations, and photographs). By reading “everything” about texts that are addressed more or less directly to “Death,” we will engage questions about biography and thanatography in terms of (un)translability and (un)readability: we will pay particular attention to publication histories (various translations and editions) and biobibliographic conventions for self-reference and self-citation.

We will focus primarily on works written by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. Readings will include Barthes’ Barthes by BarthesCamera Lucida, and Mourning Diary; Blanchot’s Madness of the Day, Death Sentence, Writing the Disaster, “Literature and the Right to Die,” and The Instant of My Death; Derrida’s “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” Demeure, “Living / On: Borderline,” “Pac(e Nots),” “Telepathy,” “Maurice Blanchot est mort”; “ . . . . .” [on Sarah Kofman’s posthumously published final essay, in two different versions in The Work of Mourning and Sarah Kofman, Selected Writings]; The Gift of Death, and Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money; and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s “The Echo of the Subject” in Typography. As they become relevant to our discussion of these readings, selected pages written by Paul de Man, Sigmund Freud, Soren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger will be introduced. We will also pay some attention to video and death in some of Bill Viola’s writings in Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House and watch Jean-Pierre Melville’s La Silence de la Mer (1949) in conjunction with Blanchot’s The Instant of my Death. For more information, please go to the course website.

ENG
6138

Networked Traces: Reconsidering Video Production

This seminar will address problems in cultural theory through the making of video images and tapes, as a specific approach to the larger field of Media and Cultural Studies. Video will be conceived as a mode of embodied writing and knowledge production parallel to other more familiar modes of textual construction. Prior experience with video or computers might be helpful but is not required; all technologies will be introduced at a basic level prior to initiating your own work.

The seminar derives from three significant events in the recent past, all characterized by a convergence of elements previously assumed to be categorically separate. Theoretical work and artistic practice have converged so that work in either area now freely borrows from the other. A similar convergence has occurred between computers and video, now fused in a hybrid medium. Last, intercultural concerns and avant-garde strategies of representation have likewise merged to produce some of the most exciting video work since the 1990s.

The convergence of theoretical writing and artistic practice characterizes such critical texts as Derrida’s Glas, Blanchot's Step / Not Beyond, Barthes' Roland Barthes , Ronell's Telephone Book, and Agamben’s Idea of Prose, and such videotapes as Yun-ah Hong's Memory / All Echo, Woody Vasulka's Art of Memory, Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied, and Isaac Julian’s Encore. We will read theoretical texts as possible models for video work, and view films and tapes that have previously attempted an intersection of cultural theory and moving image media. In both cases, established literary and filmic texts will act as points of departure for the generation of new models. At the same time, participants in the seminar will regularly produce and screen their own video work in response to class discussion and to each other’s video texts.

The merging of computers and video implies hypermedia, as video parallels alphabetic text as a primary organizing tool of interactive multimedia. As orientation for this recently determining context, we will look at works by avant-garde artists who have been conceptually interactive for a long time. Accordingly, the seminar’s video work will be produced and discussed in the context of such historic digital imaging developments as Hypermedia, DVD-ROMs, HDTV and a video-capable Internet. However, this discussion will be oriented not towards the technology as such, but towards its implications for the reconfiguration of knowledge, power and desire in a social context.

Last, a contemporary renewal of avant-garde strategies of representation has emerged to articulate problems of identity, race, gender, economy and history in a multidiasporic world culture. We will look at videos generated from such culturally hybrid situations as Korea/US, Britain/Nigeria, Uganda/US, Iran/Britain and Aborigine/Australia, as a currently active and dispersed media project by which we can set bearings for new work.

We will be working with Mac G5 Final Cut Pro editing systems, which are user-friendly desktop computers designed for video production. The department will provide DV and HD camcorders for shooting high quality footage. Attention may also be given to problems of institutional design and innovation, as a social basis for work in video.

ENL 6246

Wordsworth and Keats

In a now-famous letter (27 October 1818) John Keats offered his friend
Richard Woodhouse some reflections on genius and ambition:

As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if
I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian
or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it
is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It
has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto,
be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It
has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen.

The younger poet defines himself and his poetry in terms of his difference
from what Harold Bloom would call his “great precursor,” Wordsworth.
What does Keats mean by the “egotistical sublime” and by
the very notion that there is a “poetical Character”? What
is the nature of influence and what does this particular pairing of Wordsworth
and Keats tell us about the literary history and culture of Romanticism?

We will consider these and other questions, first by a close reading
of Wordsworth’s poetry and major essays in the context of the revolutionary
decade of the 1790s through the early years of the next century. We
will then read Keats’s poetry and letters in the context of Wordsworth,
adding such poems as The Excursion (1814) and other later
works by Wordsworth to the mix. How do we compare the achievement of
Wordsworth’s long career (he lived from 1770–1850) to Keats’s
all-too-brief but remarkably intense career (he died at 25)?

Students will be encouraged to pursue various lines of inquiry, including
(but not limited to), theoretical questions of influence, the contemporary
and later receptions of both poets (particularly interesting in the Victorian
period), their relationships to women writers or women writers’ various
assessments of them. In addition to a few informal presentations,
students will produce a 20-page seminar paper in stages (proposal, mock-conference
paper, completed draft).

LAE
6947

Writing Theories & Practices

This course introduces you to perspectives on writing and the teaching of writing in colleges and universities. It aims to give you historical and theoretical contexts in which to place your emerging teaching career. Expect to do much writing and reading.

LIT
6236

Before Windrush: Victorian & Modernist Literature of the Caribbean

Until recently, Anglophone Caribbean literary scholars have identified the “Windrush Generation” – George Lamming, V.S. Naipaul, and their peers – as the founders of the West Indian literary tradition. Named after the ship that carried the first postwar immigrants from Jamaica to England, these writers emigrated to London in the 1950s where they quickly and unequivocally established the international and national reputation of the West Indian literature. Simon Gikandi and other scholars have correctly identified Lamming, Sam Selvon, Wilson Harris and others of this generation as modernists – they were masters of modernist aesthetics which they employed in the enterprise of disrupting colonial ideology and historiography and in the quest to establish a national consciousness across the Caribbean. Belinda Edmondson and others have also associated this generation with the Victorian period, arguing that these male writers denied status and manhood by virtue of their colonial birth and their African and Indian heritage claimed a manhood based on the model of Victorian authors such as Thomas Carlyle and Charles Kingsley– men who established their economic independence and social status through their erudition and their books. At the same time, this generation of Caribbean writers was deeply invested in challenging the vision of the West Indians articulated by Victorian authors – Carlyle and Kingsley not lead among them.

Yet we need not turn to the 1950s to discover Caribbean modernists or Victorians. Caribbeans were writing a variety of genres – slave narratives, travel narratives, novels, scholarly and political treatises – in the nineteenth century, and they were producing modernist aesthetics during the period of high modernism. This course examines the formal techniques, historical context, and political significance of a range of nineteenth and early twentieth century literary texts from the Anglophone Caribbean. It explores how Caribbean writers appropriated, transformed, and debated British and European aesthetics – in particular the genres of travel narrative, tourist guide, romance, and various modernist formal techniques. The class will address writers’ participation in the debate over slavery; their views of indenture and the place of indentured Chinese and Indian workers and their descendants; their articulation of cultural nationalism, Pan Africanism, anti-imperialism and first Wave feminism; and their perspective on the rising power of the United States in the region. These early texts give us a significantly broader vision of conceptions of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity in Caribbean literary culture.

In the Victorian period we will read better known texts such as The History of Mary Prince (1831), Wonderful adventures of Mrs. Seacole in many lands (1857), J.J. Thomas’s Froudacity (1889), as well as, newly rediscovered novels such as Emmanuel Appadocca: or Blighted Life. A Tale of the Boucaneers (Michel Maxwell Philip, 1854) and Frieda Cassin’s With Silent Tread (@1890) – and historical documents such as documents Maharani’s Misery (ed. Verene Shepherd). From the early twentieth century, we will read a variety of literary and non-fiction texts, some of which employ modernist aesthetics and/or critique it; these will most likely include Stephen Cobham’s Rupert Gray (1907), Thomas MacDermot’s One Brown Girland— (1909), Herbert de Lisser’s Twentieth Century Jamaica (1913), Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929), and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934). We will also read shorter texts from magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

LIT
6358

A Critical-Theoretical Look at the Harlem Renaissance

This course extends the Harlem Renaissance and the geographical place of Harlem to embrace an international movement in Black creative and intellectual production between the 1920s and the end of the 1930s. During this period between the war years, Harlem was in vogue and Caribbean, African, and American Blacks began a concerted effort to redefine Blackness in their literatures, arts, and political writings. In discussing this period, the course calls on students to critically and theoretically discuss issues of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. The critical and theoretical component includes such commentators as Houston Baker, Hazel Carby, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Barbara Christian, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Negri.

LIT
6855

Rationality, Irrationality, and Modernity

A nearly axiomatic definition of modernity, usually associated with Max Weber, emphasizes the increasing rationality – and rationalization – of social, economic, political, intellectual and other spheres of human life, and a concomitant “disenchantment” of the world: the inevitable and progressive banishment of the “irrationalities” of religion, “superstition,” emotion, aesthetics, and so forth. Yet other great theorists of modernity, notably Freud, exposed a pervasive irrational core to contemporary existence. In this course, we’re going to explore the problem of rationality versus irrationality in the context of Western modernity, particularly with regard to the meaning and persistence of “irrational” belief. We will also consider the modern project of attempting to “rationally” explain the “irrational,” and thus also delve into questions of the relationship of science to other fields of human experience and inquiry, including religion, the arts, and humanities. The readings will be chosen to be of wide applicability to students working on a diversity of literary, cultural, and theoretical projects. They will include, in addition to Freud and Weber, works by William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Horkheimer and Adorno.

LIT
6856

Appearances in the Court of History: Representing Revolution

A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty
By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,
Will I see you no more before eternity?

– Charles Baudelaire, “À une passante”

In this course, we will take up the question of the representation of the “fleeting beauty” of what the influential contemporary French thinker Alain Badiou names an Event. In particular, our focus will be on a rich and diverse range of literary and cultural texts, some contemporary and others more recent, that struggle to represent what occurred in four political uprisings that take place over roughly a sixty year period in the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century: John Brown’s 1859 raid at Harper’s Ferry; the 1871 Paris Commune; the Russian Revolution of 1905; and the 1916 Easter Uprising in Ireland. What all these events share is the fact that they were failures, their participants captured, violently condemned by the authorities as terrorists, and executed or forced into exile. Yet, despite this fact, these short lived “lightning flashes” all hold a particular fascination for a diverse range of artists and intellectuals.

In his recent book, The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou opens with a Preamble entitled, “What Is Called Failure?” wherein he observes, “The thought of failure emerges at the point when a politics appears before the court of History, and when it sees itself there.” Among its numerous valences, Badiou raises here a fundamental question concerning the representation of history. In another recent essay, Fredric Jameson similarly highlights the insufficiencies of the strategies of classical realism – whose fundamental requirement he suggests is “a conviction as to the massive weight and persistence of the present as such” – to engage with these kinds of events. As a result, such lightning flashes call forth a fundamental rethinking of how we represent the past, and a wholesale invention of new narrative forms.

In our seminar, we will look at the instructive failures and partial successes of some of these efforts, mining them for the lessons they have for our own efforts to grapple with the representation of a past and present in the midst of its own dramatic changes. After an opening look at the Badiou book and Jameson essay cited above, our readings and viewings will cluster around these four sites. Although the final list has yet to be determined, works we will examine will include many of the following: W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown; Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body; Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter; Michelle Cliff, Free Enterprise; Élie Reclus, The Paris Commune Day by Day; Karl Marx, The Civil War in France; Émile Zola, La Débâcle; Bertolt Brecht, The Days of the Commune; Edith Thomas, The Women Incendiaries; Isaak Dinesen, Babette’s Feast; Gabriel Axel (d), Babette’s Feast; Leon Trotsky, 1905; Rosa Luxemberg, The Mass Strike; Andrei Bely, Petersburg; Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star; Sergei Eisenstein (d), Battleship Potemkin; Vladamir Mayakovsky, Moscow in Flames; Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 1; James Stephen, The Insurrection in Dublin; Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars; James Joyce, Ulysses; Neil Jordan (d), Michael Collins; Ken Loach (d), The Wind that Shakes the Barley; Roddy Doyle, A Star Called Henry; and short poems by Arthur Rimbaud, Pádraic Pearse, and W.B. Yeats.

LIT
6934

Shakespeare: Rhetoric & Literacy

This course will investigate a simple proposition with multiple implications. Stanley Cavell in his famous collection of essays, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, best expresses the motive of the proposition:

Nothing without, perhaps nothing within, Shakespeare’s words could discover the power to withstand the power Shakespeare’s words release. Is this, since then, the demand we place, to greater or lesser extents, on all writing we care about seriously?

Agreeing with this assessment – which is to say that I feel it acutely – I propose to analyze Shakespeare’s rhetoric in terms of what classical rhetorical teaching would have called invention, or as we would say in a literal translation, “finding.” I want to look at some of the principal sources in which Shakespeare “finds” both the inspiration and the materials behind his astonishing rhetoric. Principally, I want to consider the Latin sources that we now think Shakespeare was far more conversant with than used to be conceded. Chief amongst these sources in this particular course will be Ovid and Lucretius.

I should make clear immediately that the course does not require, explicitly or implicitly, a knowledge of Latin and that the course is not a throwback to venerable EinflussStudien. We will be studying Shakespeare as a reader, a highly literate man, not as an “erudite.” To be sure, there will be times when we need the ipsissima verba, and on those occasions we will find them through the Internet or through other means that I will make available. But primarily our work will be research on the topics of invention that Shakespeare encountered in the Latin writers who were most influential in his career. Thus, to give a quick but salient example, in the early narrative poem: “Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare responds to Lucretius on various occasions primarily by way of Lucretius’s famous celebration of Venus that begins in book 1 and continues throughout the De rerum natura. Such topicality, to use one of the technical terms for it (there are others), enables investigations of Shakespeare’s texts which return often surprising results. If Shakespeare is not as “erudite” as his great contemporary Ben Jonson, it turns out that he is nonetheless a very literate poet. It is this literacy that we will be most interested in examining so as to appreciate some of the impulses that contribute to the “power” that Cavell so memorably describes.

Requirements for the course will be participation in the seminar as we discuss the details of Shakespeare’s rhetoric and literacy and two essays prepared outside of class in which students undertake an analysis of a particular example of Shakespeare’s rhetoric and literacy. These essays need not necessarily be lengthy nor, at least in the first instance, do they need to comport large (“bone-breaking”) bibliographies. First and foremost, they must engage with the way that Shakespeare transforms sources: he is the most original writer in our tradition who starts from sources not his own, not original with him – almost as if others’ inventions of topics liberated him to invent English poetry (this is the simple proposition of the course). We will test this proposition to learn how it may help us to understand the rhetoric with which Shakespeare composes and contains what we can only call “the power Shakespeare’s words release.”

LIT
6934

History and Representation in Children's Literature

The child’s entrance into the world, as Marah Gubar has observed, is always belated: young people, she writes, “are born into a world in which stories about who they are (and what they should become) are already in circulation” (6). The task of children’s literature, then, involves introducing the young reader to – and suturing her firmly within – a social formation whose existence preceded her own. Little wonder, then, that so many works of children’s literature have taken as their subject the (often idealized) past.

In this course, then, we will study the representation of history in children’s literature. We will consider key works of children’s literature through various theoretical perspectives, including those offered by Karl Marx, György Lukács, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and Pierre Nora. Students will be required to compose and present a theoretically-informed seminar paper on the topic of history and children’s literature.

LIT 6934

Digital Inquiry in Writing Studies

This class begins by asking: Just what is the Digital Humanities anyway? To get at this question, we will explore different definitions of the digital humanities, influences of digital technology’s encounter with writing and literary studies, and the construction and function of digital research centers in the humanities that are popping up all over the country. This course then zooms in on how digital technologies can shape our research practices in inventive and productive ways. With the advent of the Internet, the World Wide Web, open source software, Web 2.0, (etc.), research possibilities have been revolutionized by digital technologies that afford new opportunities to collect, organize, analyze, visualize, present, and share source material. Such affordances, in turn, create potential to generate new theories about how discourse functions to generate knowledge, poetics, and collectivity. To harness such potential, students interested in a wide range of genres, media, and subject areas will have the opportunity to explore, generate, and theorize about digital research methods useful for their own scholarship.

This course specifically explores how students can reconfigure their scholarly research by:

rethinking “objects of study” in light of digital culture

building digital archives and collections for further study and analysis

employing digital tools and resources for organizing, visualizing, analyzing, and presenting research findings, and

generating open access to their own scholarship.

As students explore the practical implications of such technologies, students will engage with theories about writing, archives, information visualization, new media, and open access in a digital age. Possible course texts that we will dive into include:

“Digital Humanities 1.0 and 2.0”

“The Ivory Tower and the Open Web” by Dan Cohen

Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida

Archive Stories by Antoinette Burton

Digital History by Cohen and Rosenzweig

Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti

The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich

Writing Machines by Katherine Hayles

New New Media by Paul Levinson

The Two Virtuals by Alex Reid

New Media/New Methods edited by Jeff Rice and Marcel O’Gorman

Reading and Writing New Media edited by Cheryl Ball and James Kalmbach

The Companion to Digital Literary Studies by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemans

The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age edited by A. Earhart and A. Jewell

The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship by John Willinsky

Students will also have the opportunity to craft their own research methods to be used in projects for current or future research. For example, while some students may choose to produce their own digital collections, others can develop digital histories, research strategies for studying circulation, or invent digital pedagogies. As such, students can expect to walk away from the class with novel ideas about how to proceed with their own scholarship.